STRATEGY

Do You Actually Need a Website If You Have a Facebook Page?

I get asked this a few times a month, usually by someone who already has 900 followers and a steady trickle of enquiries in their inbox. They half expect me to say "of course you need a website" because I build them. So here is the version I actually give people on the phone, including the part where I tell some of them not to spend the money yet.

Is a Facebook page enough for a small business?

Sometimes, yes. I would rather tell you that than take money you shouldn't be spending.

A Facebook page is genuinely enough if most of these describe you:

• You work in one suburb or one small town, and almost every job comes from someone who was told about you.
• Your average job is under about R1 500 — a haircut, a cake, a car wash, a school-run lift club.
• You are turning over less than roughly R5 000 a month and every rand has a job already.
• Nobody is Googling your category before they buy. They ask in the neighbourhood group instead.
• You have no capacity for more work anyway. A booked-out one-person business does not need more leads.

If that is you, spend the money on a decent phone camera, consistent posting, and getting your Google Business Profile listed and reviewed. That is free and it will do more for you this quarter than a website will. Come back when you are turning work away or when you want jobs outside your circle.

Where the page stops being enough is a specific moment, and most people can feel it before they can name it: you start needing customers who have never heard of you. The second your growth depends on strangers rather than referrals, a Facebook page becomes a bad tool for the job.

What can a website do that a Facebook page can't?

The honest list is longer than most people expect, and it is not about looking professional. It is about who controls the channel and where buyers actually search.

Two of those deserve more than a table cell.

Organic reach is basically gone. A page post now reaches a small single-digit percentage of your own followers unless you pay. You built that audience; you now rent access to it. Every post is a small auction you did not agree to enter.

AI assistants can't cite you. This one is new and most people have not caught up to it. When somebody asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI answers for "a reliable electrician in Boksburg", the assistant answers from pages it can crawl and quote. Facebook blocks most of that crawling behind logins and rate limits. So a business with a plain, fast, publicly readable site gets named, and the business with 2 000 Facebook followers does not exist as far as the assistant is concerned. That gap is going to widen, not close.

What happens when Facebook changes the rules?

You find out afterwards. That is the whole problem.

I have watched a Cape Town food business lose a page with 11 000 followers to an automated flag over a photo. No warning, no human to email, an appeal form that returned a template response. They had no email list, no site, and no way to tell anyone where they had gone. They rebuilt from zero over about eight months.

You do not have to imagine a ban for this to bite, either. Meta changes what gets shown, kills a format you had built your content around, or decides your category needs extra verification. Each change is small on its own. The pattern is that the ground moves and you had no say in it.

A website is the opposite kind of asset. Boring, quiet, and entirely under your control. If your host annoys you, you move the files. If Google changes something, your site is still there while you adjust. The domain is the part that really matters — it is the address people and machines can always find you at, and it costs about R120 a year to keep in your own name.

Should you run both?

Yes, and the framing matters. It was never website or Facebook. The site is your home base; Facebook is a channel that points at it.

The setup I put in place for South African trades and small service businesses looks like this:

• Website as the base. Services, suburbs you cover, real photos of real work, prices or at least price ranges, and one obvious next step on every page.
• Google Business Profile fed by the site. Same name, address and phone number everywhere, linked to the site. This is what wins "near me" searches, and it is free.
• WhatsApp Business as the enquiry channel. South Africans do not fill in contact forms and wait two days — they tap the WhatsApp button. Put a floating WhatsApp button on every page, set a greeting message, use catalogues and quick replies. Your website's job is to get someone confident enough to tap it.
• Facebook and Instagram as the shop window. Post the work, answer the comments, run paid campaigns if the numbers work. Every bio link, every post that gets traction, points back to a page on your site.

The test is simple: if Meta deleted your page tonight, could customers still find you, still see what you do, still contact you? If the answer is no, you have built your business on rented ground. If the answer is yes, then Facebook is doing exactly what it is good at — showing people your work — without being the only thing holding your business up.

If you are past the "word of mouth is enough" stage, the next question is usually what this costs. I wrote that up properly in how much a website costs in South Africa, and if you are in the trades, the setup that actually gets plumbers called covers the specific pages that convert. Or send me what you do and where you work and I will tell you straight whether you need a site yet.